Disputed questions in religious history: The Crusades and the Inquisition

Are the Crusades and the Inquisition really still disputed? I mean, by now we all know that the Christians were the Bad Guys who committed lots of atrocities against the poor infidels in the Crusades and that the Inquisitors were Bad Guys who went around burning people left and right, right and left, don't we?
Wrong.
In the Crusades, the pendulum is swinging back to center from the "Christians as Bad Guys" position, and as for the Inquisition, extreme feminist historians notwithstanding who like to conjure up a white-robed army hunting down hordes of women and burning them as witches, well, there's another, less hysterical side to that story too.
It was time for a new book. Not a lengthy, scholarly book with lots of footnotes and other such apparatus--there are many such outstanding books--but a shorter, user-friendly book to appeal to the general reader and, even more importantly, to be used in college classrooms, that would make a contribution to setting the record straight.
Time for a disclosure. From time to time I review books that I have professionally edited and, in some cases, acquired for my publisher, and this is one of them. The author, Fr. John Vidmar, OP, is a historian on the faculty at Providence College, has done work on the Crusades and, as Archivist of the northeastern USA Province of the Order of Preachers, has access to all sorts of material in the archives, some of which relates to the Inquisition. His earlier book The Catholic Church Through the Ages is one of Paulist Press's best sellers (and is being revised and updated for its tenth anniversary--after all, we've had two new popes since the first edition came out), and so I asked him to consider writing on the Crusades and the Inquisition for our 101 Q&A series.
My brief to the author: Read as many of the latest books on the subjects--and there are plenty of them, by such outstanding scholars as Philip Jenkins, Christopher Tyerman, and others--and give us a balanced assessment of the situation: one that takes into account the recent writings and steers a middle course between the extremes.
This is what you have in the book under review. John Vidmar writes with a flair for narrative history and an obvious love of his subject matter. Noteworthy about this book is the way he draws a connection between the Crusades and the Inquisitions (and he does point out and explain the difference between the Roman and the Spanish Inquisitions -- they're not the same thing). He brings his treatment of the Crusades up to the present day by reflecting on how this segment of our history impacts Christian-Muslim relations today--surely a timely issue.
101 Questions & Answers on the Crusades and the Inquisition is a book by an author eminently skilled in putting material over to college and grad students as well as to general audiences. If you're interested in reading something that contributes to setting the record straight on the disputed questions of the Crusades and the Inquisition, I recommend that you buy it.